Counterpoint: I have used Kakoune for a year now, immediately following sixteen years of heavy vim use. I find Kakoune far more intuitive than vim, because the

Counterpoint: I have used Kakoune for a year now, immediately following sixteen years of heavy vim use. I find Kakoune far more intuitive than vim, because the feature set composes so well. Within the first few weeks I understood the command set well enough to combine features to solve editing problems I would have had to look up solutions to if using vim. Regarding the worry of visual distraction of selections slowing down editing, I found the opposite to be the case as I became more fluent with Kakoune. Motions modify the selection, and it is quite common for the selection to serendipitously contain what I want to modify. Constantly visible selection(s) lead me to implicitly take advantage of motion and use fewer keystrokes. Regarding multiple selections outside the visible window, you are right that there's no visual feedback for those selections, which is a degraded experience compared to when all selections are visible. But that's no worse than the experience of a global search/replace in vim. You are arguing that in an edge case, Kakoune is no better than vim, which doesn't seem like a meaningful detraction.